Levees Not War

*

Keynote Speaker is Gambit’s Deborah Cotton

Deborah Cotton, a Gambit reporter and activist who was injured in the notorious Mother’s Day shooting on May 12, will be the keynote speaker for the 8th annual Rising Tide conference on Saturday, Sept. 14, at Xavier University in New Orleans. Ms. Cotton was one of 19 people injured by three shooters during a second-line parade in the Seventh Ward to honor Mother’s Day. (See our account of the shooting here.)

A Los Angeles native who moved to New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina (2005), Cotton writes about and videotapes second line culture, Mardi Gras Indians, brass bands, and social aid and pleasure clubs for Gambit under the pen name “Big Red” Cotton. She has written Notes on New Orleans for NOLA.com, Gambit’s Blog of New Orleans, and her own web site New Orleans Good Good. Ms. Cotton appeared on Brass Bands panel at Rising Tide 6, where she spoke about the New Orleans noise ordinance. (Click here for a fine tribute by her Gambit colleague Kevin Allman.)

Also featured at Rising Tide 8

Creating Community for Writers of Color: MelaNated Writers Collective will discuss why New Orleans is a city ripe for literary rebirth. Moderated by Jarvis DeBerry of the Times-Picayune and NOLA.com, panelists include authors jewel bush, columnist for Uptown Messenger; David Thaddeus Baker, web editor for The Louisiana Weekly; Kelly Harris, founder of Poems & Pink Ribbons; and Gian Smith, spoken word poet and author of “O Beautiful Storm.”

Tech School is back! Katy Monnot of Bird on the Street hosts a day of presentations on better use of social media for individuals and businesses. On the Working with Bloggers panel, Bridgette Duplantis, Maria Sinclair, Shercole King and Victoria Adams discuss how small business can leverage the power of blogs to help with promotions. Megan B. Capone, Celeste “Metry Chick” Haar, and Marielle “NOLA Chick” Songy will talk about about Personal Branding: When You are What You’re Selling. Addie King, Jess Leigh, and Cara Jougelard will present Using Visual Tools in Online Promotion, and Steve Maloney will present a primer on Content Marketing.

Like Rising Tide on Facebook (don’t forget to share!), follow Rising Tide on Twitter (don’t forget to retweet!), and check for programming updates on the Rising Tide Conference Blog or Rising Tide website. Registration for Rising Tide 8 is open now!

What Is Rising Tide?

The Rising Tide conferences, held  since 2006 on or near the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, bring together bloggers, activists, techies and other geeks, teachers, writers, artists, and experts in education, public safety, infrastructure, Louisiana politics, the environment, Internet technology, sports, parenting in New Orleans, and many other topics pertaining to the area’s ongoing recovery from hurricanes, “federal floods,” oil spills, and other challenges.

Past featured speakers have included David Simon (co-creator of HBO’s Treme and The Wire); the actor and activist Harry Shearer; N.O. geographer and historian Rich Campanella; Treme-born writer Lolis Eric Elie, director of the documentary Faubourg Treme: The Untold Story of Black New Orleans; former Tulane professor of history Lawrence N. Powell, author of The Accidental City: Improvising New Orleans; Mother Jones human rights and environmental reporter (Ms.) Mac McClelland; and authors John Barry, Dave Zirin, and Chris Cooper and Bobby Block.

Click here for a listing of previous Rising Tide programs, with links to videos and more.

Rising Tide NOLA, Inc., is a nonprofit organization formed by New Orleans bloggers in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the federally built levees. After the disaster, the Internet became a vital connection among dispersed New Orleanians, former New Orleanians, and friends of the city and the Gulf Coast region. A surge of new blogs were created, and combined with those that were already online, an online community with a shared interest in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast developed. In the summer of 2006, to mark the anniversary of the flood, the bloggers of New Orleans organized the first Rising Tide Conference, taking their shared interest in technology, the arts, the internet and social media and turning advocacy in the city into action.

All are welcome. Advance registration for students is $18, and for the general public, $20. The ticket includes breakfast and lunch (provided by Laurel Street Bakery and Juan’s Flying Burrito, respectively).

The food is great, and the discussions are even more nourishing. We’ve been to four Rising Tides, and we’ll be there again this year. Sign up now!

*

Click below to read about previous Rising Tides (most recent first): 

Rising Tide 7 Is Sat. Sept. 22 at Xavier (2012)

Dedra Johnson of ‘The G Bitch Spot’ Wins Rising Tide’s Ashley Award (2011)

Live-Blogging from Rising Tide 6 (2011)

Rising Tide 6 Is August 27, So Register Today (2010)

Live-Blogging from Rising Tide 5 in New Orleans (2010)

Come Surf the Rising Tide : Aug. 28 in New Orleans (2008)

Rising Tide 5 Is Aug. 28 in New Orleans: Register Today (2010)

RT4: Sinking to New Heights (2009)

Rising Tide III in New Orleans Aug. 22–24 (2008)

Viva New Orleans—for Art’s Sake! (2007)

Making Blogging Sexy: Rising Tide 2 (2007)

September 24, 1962–August 2, 2013

“My message is kind of an emperor’s new clothes thing: I’m making fun of them, but I’m also trying to remind people that you have a choice. And if you don’t get involved in it, then it’s going to continue, and they’ll continue to put on the circus show for you, amusing you by proposing laws about pants that show ass crack, or Darwin being racist, at the same time that they’re screwing over your future.” —Greg Peters

*

[ Update 8/10/13 : Be sure to read Mark Moseley’s thoughtful tribute to his friend and ours at The Lens, “Remembering the unforgettable: a salute to the late, very great Greg Peters.” Highly recommended. ]

 

It is with sadness that we note the death yesterday of our friend Greg Peters, an award-winning cartoonist, artist, and writer, following heart surgery at Oschner Medical Center in New Orleans. A native of Marquette, Michigan, who was an all-but-dissertation-Ph.D. in English and creative writing at the University of Louisiana (Lafayette), Greg Peters was 50.

In his own words (from his profile at Lafayette Creative [‘artsy, without the fartsy’]):

Greg Peters is a cartoonist, writer and graphic designer living in Louisiana. He is available for freelance work, as well as speaking engagements, personal appearances at bachelorette parties, raucous press club luncheons, and swanky, black-tie bourgeois pig feeds, where his unassailable personal magnetism and colorful vocabulary make him a sure object of intense, whispered conversation.

Although we did not know Greg as well as we would like to have known him—living in separate cities, and meeting only at the Rising Tide conferences whose posters he designed year after year—we always admired his intelligence, artistic talent, his satirical wit and no-bullshit honesty, and his very wide and loyal network of friends, in New Orleans and beyond, who will be mourning his passing. We will miss Greg in much the same way as Ashley Morris is missed: talented life-forces who passed too early, too young, from this physical realm, but whose spirits live on among us and continue to inspire our best, most honest work and our best living, as if life itself, and how you live it, matters. We are not OK, because they are gone. But we’ll be OK, because they’re still with us on the inside.

Putting Art to Work Against Official Incompetence and Mendacity

Peters’s award-winning “Suspect Device” editorial cartoon series (named after the song by Stiff Little Fingers) was published in the Times of Acadiana and Gambit, and other graphic work was featured in the book Attitude 2: The New Subversive Alternative Cartoonists (2004). He designed posters for the Port of New Orleans, among other clients, and, from 2007 on, he designed posters for all but one of the Rising Tide conferences on the future of New Orleans. (A sampling of his work appears below.) He also created the cover for A Howling in the Wires: An Anthology of Writing from Postdiluvian New Orleans (2010), which includes two of his blog posts from Suspect Device.

Kevin Allman has posted a fine tribute at Gambit, noting that Peters was “funny—and always furious and rude, juxtaposed with sophisticated writing. In a 2004 profile of Peters and his work, former Gambit music editor Scott Jordan noted, ‘Peters’ craft is fueled by his punk rock-influenced DIY personality and educational background in literary criticism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and Buddhism—all meeting the surreal arena of Louisiana politics.’ ”

Other tributes can be found at NOLA.com, Toulouse Street, Library Chronicles, Liprap’s Lament, Pog mo Thoin (an especially eloquent and touching personal recollection from a friend who is not of the New Orleans blogosphere), and on Facebook, where Greg’s companion, Gambit contributor Eileen Loh (shown with Greg in top photo), posted the following:

I’m gutted to have to tell so many of Greg Peters’ friends that the world has lost a brilliant mind, a gifted artist, a scathing wit, a maestro of sarcasm, an ardent defender of the disenfranchised and the discriminated and the broken, and one of the gentlest, kindest, funniest and most fearless people I’ve ever met. He never got to live one day of his life without the congenital heart condition that got him in the end, and in my almost bottomless sadness, I am happy he’s finally free. Please keep his boys in your thoughts; they are inconsolable.

Greg Peters is survived by his two sons, Magnus and Wilder, shown embracing with him above; his companion, Eileen Loh, and his former wife, Saundra Scarce of Lafayette.

Memorial Services Announced

Eileen Loh announces on Facebook:

There will be two memorial services for Greg Peters: one in Lafayette and one in New Orleans. The former is set for next Saturday, Aug. 10, at Martin & Castille Funeral Home, 600 East Farrel Road, Lafayette (337-234-2311). Visitation starts at 1:00, and the service is from 2:00 to 4:00. • The family is hoping that some of the guests might choose to prepare a 4- or 5-minute eulogy or remembrance to read at the service, largely so that Magnus and Wilder can hear many facets of their dad’s truly one-of-a-kind personality.

The New Orleans memorial service is TBA and will be a far less classy affair, a punk Irish wake in a New Orleans dive bar, as the gods intended . . . probably toward the end of August, 23/24, so that as many of his kick-ass friends from all corners can come. I will keep you posted. 

For further details, stay tuned to Greg Peters or Eileen Loh’s Facebook pages.

 

Greg Peters, center, on a panel at the first Rising Tide conference, August 2006. From left to right: Dedra Johnson, Josh Britton, Greg Peters, Lois Dunn (Scout Prime of First Draft), and the late Ashley Morris. Photo by Maitri.

*

Let the last words, for now, be those of Charles Bukowski, as quoted in a signature in an e-mail from Greg in 2009:

“We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

*

(more…)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEBl5luhRWs

*

Shot in a Mother’s Day second-line parade in Seventh Ward

One of nineteen people injured by gunfire from three shooters in a Mother’s Day parade on Sunday, May 12, was Gambit correspondent Deborah Cotton. Also injured were at least two small children. Three other people suffered more serious wounds, though no fatalities have been reported yet. The incident occurred in the Seventh Ward near North Claiborne and Elysian Fields. (Click here for NOLA.com map/graphic.) Ms. Cotton, a Los Angeles native who moved to New Orleans before Hurricane Katrina (2005), writes about and videotapes second line culture, Mardi Gras Indians, brass bands, and social aid and pleasure clubs for Gambit under the pen name “Big Red” Cotton. She recently established the web site New Orleans Good Good to promote all that is “good good” about her adopted city. Cotton spoke in an interview in May 2012 about the toll that street (gun) violence has taken on New Orleans (video above).

“I believe that it can be prevented. We are just not being smart and strategic about how to address this in a systematic way. . . . Every six months someone you know, a friend of someone or a family member of someone you know is murdered. After a while it begins to really tear at you internally. I feel that we’re at the point where we cannot not fix this anymore.

“. . . the overarching problem is the lack of education and resources and employment opportunities for young people, especially young black men, and just the history of oppression and political corruption that has taken resources and opportunities meant for some of the most vulnerable, the most at-risk people in our community and diverted those resources and opportunities to self-serving folks in leadership who are supposed to be doling out those resources [to those in need], and so we’re seeing the results of that here.”

Deborah Cotton was taken to Interim LSU Hospital for surgery and was said to be in guarded but stable condition as of Monday night. Here is her last tweet before going to the parade:

*

Gambit is organizing a benefit; details will be announced soon. Gambit advises readers: “If you have any information about the shooting, call Crimestoppers. You don’t have to give your identity and you may still be eligible for a cash reward. As of tonight, Crimestoppers is offering a $10,000 aggregate reward for information. Call 504-822-1111.” Click here for a map by Alejandro de los Rios showing where the shootings happened in relation to the second line parade route, and a map of other assaults in New Orleans on Sunday.

*

*